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I think a freedom of the internet constitutional amendment would probably be one of the only ways to get them to stop. The problem is the likelyhood of an amendment like that getting through....not very high.

The other way we could stop them would be to somehow get the courts to declare an elected official's browsing history to be a matter of public record. That would be a whole barrel of fun.

After all, there are few things as influential as the internet. And the Amendments all address wide-reaching ideas. It would be a revolutionary prospect in that it would be the first Amendment to mention such a modern creation, but given the power and depth of the internet it might just be the only thing that could match the seriousness of the topic at hand.

And though it may be extreme, it is a solution to what seems to be an on-going problem.

Movements to pass constitutional amendments take YEARS to build. It can and does happen, but it takes patience. The question is whether or not the people who are so impassioned on the issue have that kind of patience, or if they'd rather call it quits because it's "hopeless" before the next election cycle has even arrived.

We are talking about the Internet here! We are talking about the future of all communication, we have to stand up and fight for it; the internet is the last true wild wild west in the world and it needs to stay that way forever.

In the world? Certainly not. In the developed world? I guess. I still don't really get the argument though; painting the Internet in the light of lawlessness and frontier justice doesn't really do much to promote the cause to the average person. When they hear that they think "piracy" and "sex predators out to get my little Susie."

How do you fight against sneaky, underhanded tactics that evade public scrutiny? This bullshit law is superfluous anyways - the US is already doing the very thing that (as I understand it), this bill is designed to enforce. My country (Canada), and Mexico both recently were permitted to join the Trans Pacific Partnership trade negotiations. You know why? Because Obama and his trade negotiators strong-armed us into agreeing to heavy-handed and unnecessary copyright law reform.

For some fucked up reason, as was pointed out in the video, many countries (including Canada, the US and the EU), negotiate trade deals in secret, beyond the scrutiny of our voters and legislators. Harper (our Prime Minister), even went so far as to send his chief of staff to the table, instead of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The power of the American economy, even when it's reeling as it is nowadays, is enough to extort all kinds of unwanted concessions in secret negotiations. Then they all claim "it's an international treaty agreement, we have no choice to comply, it's out of our hands".

Lamar Smith and his ilk (which IMO includes the entire Conservative caucus of the Canadian government), make me sick to my fucking stomach.

Ins't the UN working on 'net neutrality issues, or am I just reading too much into the latest news?

Affirms that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice, in accordance with articles 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;

What makes you think this would change anything? You already have a constitution that protects against many things that are already being committed against US citizens without repurcussion. Why would this be any different?

I really wish this would be voted higher, just because he really seems to be at the center of all of this.

Hollywood will eventually learn that censorship isn't the best way to combat piracy. Eventually, when the older execs die and make room for younger execs, they'll realize "hey wait, we can pay technicians to update our infrastructure, make it easier to watch things legally online, rather than paying lawyers millions of dollars to lobby congress"

If they poured the money they're giving congressmen into tech staff, they'd likely be able to cut their piracy issue by orders of magnitude. Instead, they're continuing to play by an outdated business model and Smith is all too happy to take their money to put forth bad legislation.

People need to vote this guy out. He is probably the most dangerous man in the US so far as internet rights go, and if we can't vote him out, then it goes to show the internet still has problems flexing its powers. Perhaps we can all get together to create a media campaign to inundate his district?

I'm somewhat used to Hollywood execs being first hired in their 40s or 50s, so realistically speaking I'd say in another decade we should start getting a very different looking hollywood than we have today.

I would wish that were true but it doesn't seem in line with Hollywood's actual actions. This seems a near identical attempt to what they tried pulling with Beta, Hollywood's first instinct is to seek legal protection rather than updating their business model. You need to look no further than how HBO has decided to deal with piracy.

The entrenched model is currently still profitable, and so they feel rather than reinvesting into the changing media landscape, Hollywood prefers to hold onto whatever profits they can currently grab until it's no longer viable.

Kodak was the first to pioneer digital cameras, but unwilling to fully relent to the changing landscape, they went bust. Executives are humans too, they make poor choices and they're all too quick to stick to what made them money rather than risk dips in profits.

So I stand my by statement, the only way that Hollywood is going to change is when the new guard replaces the old.

He's been the go-to stooge for a while now, and being displaced might make others think twice about relenting to hollywood pressures. "If he got voted out because he supported these things, I might too".

Yeah, hollywood's got the money, but if the internet shows it can be effective to displace people, the internet would still have the power.

Vote them out of office? These shills are there not representing the under 40 vote because the under 40 demographic never votes in any strength. They are there because of our inaction and ow a SOPA clone WILL happen, one way or another. Perhaps the next batch of politicians would repeal it if they knew their job depended on it. This is why the tea party has been so effective, because they did more than camp and shit in a park; they voted.

If a minority of older people could take over an entire party (at least initially), why can't we do the same?

Pessimism. Few young people are confident enough in the voting system to try. The occupy movement denounced the political system as unchangable lies, but look at where that has got them. We need to end this mentality and bring change not through the lofty armed revolution that many here glorify, but through honest political revolution.

The problem is that because young people do not vote, the candidates do not need to take their opinions and needs into consideration. Imagine how different the campaign talking points would be if they actually needed to consider young peoples vote as well.

Today? Nobody really. But one can help lay the foundations of future elections to do something about such legislation. Obama was a nobody just a decade ago, the presidential candidates in 2020 may well be the product of hard work started now.

If all your energy is spent on complaining about the now, the future won't change much. If you want to make a real difference spend time doing grassroots work for local politicians to change the future politicians.

We (redditors, IT people, the public) are constantly battling to stop these draconian rules proposed by MPAA/RIAA/Disney/Sony.

As one tactical step, how about putting them on the defensive for a change, so they'll see that their underhanded attempts to turn governments and ISPs into snoops on their behalf causes serious public backlash that could hurt them in the end?

In a nutshell, Christian Scientists are people who believe that the power of God will cure and protect them from all ailments. Yes, this is a real thing. I found out several years after my grandmother died that she was a practicing Christian Scientist, and when she got pneumonia, she refused to go to a hospital. It has made me quite resentful that someone would have convinced my grandmother that she wouldn't get better if she went to a hospital.

Our districts are gerrymandered to hell, so voting him out is unlikely. Too much of his constituency doesn't really understand what these bills are about and think they are just fighting against piracy or pornography.

This is NOT the same thing as SOPA. It is terrible, but not really on the same level. Its main aim is to create new bureaucracy to deal with the IP infringement stuff.

"The bill would move the IP attache program from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), where it was first established in 2006, to the Department of Commerce. It would also expand the IP attache program into a full agency, and create a new position: the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property." -Digital Trends

5 yr jail sentences for downloading movies. Yay! The war on drugs has been reclassified, it's just a war on children now. I can't wait to spend 5 yrs in jail for stealing WOW shit. Real jail for virtual goods, let's bring back executions!!!

Yeah this is a real big issue. But My point was that it doesn't fundementally break any websites like SOPA did. (Making them responsible for user-generated content and stuff.) It just includes provisions for terrible terrible over reactive sentences for IP crime.

Thanks for the clarification. Prison, it's a for-profit industry and they need new recruits, slaves, I mean recruits. I'm guessing in a few more years, it'll be illegal to do most everything. America is like a clock winding down, letting rust into it's gears, it's grinding to a halt. Let's hope someone gets a clockmaker over here, before the gears weld themselves together.

The way I understand it is that they want to embed their agenda into bureaucracy, straight into foreign affairs. This would further drive the US copyright enforcement outside the US forward and would create yet another stepping stone for more related acts. The show would be inevitably be run by lobbied bureaucrats, positions filled with RIAA & MPAA sponsored people. Nothing good can come out of this.

what we are seeing with SOPA and the like is humanity's growing pains. the internet is the first of its kind. its a living entity because WE make it as such. its a Pandora's box if you will, and i think these congressmen that try and limit it will fail for one simple reason. that reason is that we as a "internet" a group (and a very large one at that) of people will not let it happen. look at the deep web.if one internet fails or becomes censored then one more will take its place. these bills worry me but they dont scare me because i know u cant censor the human mind or the human exspreson.

Yeah, but we have to fight for it. Who few people actually fight for our rights anymore? Big Money (Corporate or otherwise) will not stop trying to brainwash, buy their way in, or be held accountable unless we fight them. They are going to throw money at the issue till no one else stands up against them. How do you get million upon millions of Americans to fight for something not involving religion or war?

your fighting it now right. i am. many people are fighting it now. there is a belief that Americans dont care but i know that not true because we see protest about this shit on the internet and on the streets everyday. i agree with you that we need to fight it and i myself will fight this. but in the big picture this time will be remembered as the time in history when the internet won its freedom. thats why im not worried because this form of expression (the internet) is like a weed you can never get rid of it once it starts

I am not trying to be pessimistic on this, i fight, i call, i spread the message through social networks, I do all that I can, but they have an endless supply of money and people in office who are greedy. Other than numbers, what do we have for the long fight?

Taking a stand and rising to the occasion with protests can only do so much.

To change something so corrupt and so far gone from reality the sort of standing up we would have to do to make it change would end up getting violent. Big Corp/Pharma/Big $$ in Government will fight tooth and nail to keep their money in the Government and you can expect blood will be shed before any "change" comes around.

I personally am starting to think it's about time. With the rise of the internet, we need to rethink how our society - and our government - works. If that means violence against people who try to force us down, I can deal with that.

We have the smart people on our side. The internet is ridiculously fast at adapting to any attempt to blockade it. When the big SOPA blackout happened, people figured out how to get around it before they'd even finished talking about it.

Well, especially since we are that living entity, we should not be too quick to buy into the belief that all will resolve itself for the better naturally. The congressmen and their interests haven't changed, and they are determined as we are to win.

All of us have to remain not only constantly vigilant, but active in the battle at all times. The interests could always try again, but if we give a single concession or weakness, we are toast.

very true very true. and keep in mind, im not saying that we all should sit back and watch shit unfold what im saying is we will never fail. even if this new bill passes and the internet as we know it dies, a different internet will pop up in its place. it boils down to a handfull of men trying to stop the masses and history has already shown that that shit dosent work.

SOPA allowed copyright holders to take down websites that they claimed were infringing on their rights. IPAA does nothing to change the punishment or enforcement mechanisms for copyright infringement. It creates a new position in the federal government and moves the existing IP Attache positions to be under that person. These are people that lobby foreign countries for stricter IP laws. They already exist, they are just being put into their own agency.

This has come about because of the collapse of ACTA. ACTA was actually in the interest of a lot of people in the EU because it would have made the USA honour EU geographical indications - so Parma ham could only come from Parma, Champagne from Champagne, etc. That the EU parliament rejected it over copyright when there were such massive gains for the EU has forced the US to isolate IP from the rest of their trade negotiations.

This IP attaché is a big win in a lot of ways. We want these copyright negotiations to be separate, we don't want countries agreeing to them because they get tied in with other stuff. Having a separate attaché makes it far easier to keep an eye on just the copyright stuff.

The IP Attaches have no actual power. Nowhere does it say that they will promote a bill at all like SOPA. It is mainly for countries like China that do fuck all to prevent IP theft at a massive scale (not just movies/music, but industrial espionage too). These diplomats try to convince China to pass laws to prevent this, but it is still up to China.

Maybe, they could convince the UK to pass a harsh law, but then we would still blame the UK for this. It is, after all, completely up to the country to make their own laws.

This sort of thing is done in all sorts of fields. Its basically what all diplomats do. They try to convince other countries to do something that we like. In this case "reducing copyright infringement" is the goal.

And remember! Even if you THINK your congress critter is a good guy/gal or if they're in "your" party, do NOT vote for them ever again if they ever vote for or support any one of these "control the internet" bills. Vote against them in the primaries and vote third party if you can't stomach voting for the other major party.

And I'll be calling my representative, Howard Berman, SOPA co-sponsor and now IPAA co-sponsor on Monday. Geez, it's up to once a week with this guy, and he's running against another Dem to save his job.

The whole reason he gets elected is because he, and his district, are unbelievably pro-Israel. In fact, so much so that at the "town hall" he held last November (more like a campaign stop) most people there were elderly Jews threatening him on something called "J Street."

I'm really, really, really, bad at understanding legalese, but it seems like PRECISE is more in the act against actual threats of hacking and such, not so much IP protection as SOPA and PIPA were, but if my failure to understand legalese is horrible enough that I can't see the monster that this is, let me know.

Congress's attack on the internet is two-pronged at the moment. There is its media-funded intellectual property battle, of which the video specifically speaks, and there is the "defense"/security industry-funded spying battle which is necessary to enforce the former (among other things). The PRECISE Act falls into the latter category and speaks less of intellectual property than of granting the government unfettered access to private individuals' internet traffic. When speaking of internet threats, I often combine the two battles into the larger war, but I do manage to separate the media suppression that requires us to learn about what congress is doing from Russia's media rather than our own from the internet skirmishes. I have no doubt that when the government has its spying infrastructure firmly in place, however, people who speak out against its agenda will be coerced into silence much as the press has.

Really I think the best way to get around this is to show the companies and congressmen a breakdown of cost. The legislation plain won't work, no matter how hard they try to get it passed.

They are just trying to pass off chasing down the individuals up to the government since it's costing them too much money to try to do it themselves. But the reason they can't keep up will be the same reason the government won't keep up, because it is a totally futile effort. The millions in dollars in lobbying money are just going to lead to millions in future legislation, and millions in government programs to try to enforce these new laws. How does increasing government spending ever fit into a traditional fiscally conservative political mindset?

Please don't: Moderate a story based on your opinion of its source. Quality of content is more important than who created it.

Certainly, but that doesn't mean the source doesn't matter at all. I've seen some progandy-ass shit on reddit, and its really best to go with the least biased source you can find. I don't trust RT. I trust them more than Fox News, but I trust them less than CNN. RT has a very clear agenda, judging (amongst other things) their disproportionate coverage of Anonymous and Lulzsec and Wikileaks.

Not that those things are bad. But RT clearly plays those things up, a lot. They love to portray the US government as censorial as fuck. Which is why RT reports that SOPA and IPAA are the same thing. They're not.

Back in the days of SOPA we saw quite a bit of talk about 1) boycotting big studio movies in their first 3 weeks as it results in losses for the studios, whereas after that cinemas are able to make more money per viewer, and 2) pushing for legislation to protect the freedom of the Internet.

Since Sen. Wyden just agreed to further the goals of an Internet freedom initiative, maybe we should go on and boycott some of the shitty movies they're pushing?

A while back people were talking about passing a piece of legislation to stop this sort of thing from happening again.

Pretty obvious what that legislation should be.

Any politician, or interests group who attempts to even try to pass any legislation which restricts the rights of citizens in anyway must be brought up on charges of treason, making the penalty death by execution.

People like Lamar Smith need to know if they want to fuck with us, we will fuck his world up.

People like Lamar Smith need to know if they want to fuck with us, we will fuck his world up.

I believe there's a more constructive way to "fuck up" the world for MPAA/RIAA/Disney/Sony, who keep paying Lamar Smith to introduce stuff like this. Get behind the movement to reduce copyrights to their original duration of 28 years! That would hit them where it counts - right in the pocketbook - since they could no longer profit off of stuff created by people who died decades ago.

Here's a petition to sign. That will obviously be ignored by the White House, but if it gets 25,000 signatures, it might be enough to convince some folks in Congress to introduce such legislation - hopefully at least one Democrat and one Republican in each house - to counterbalance the unending stream of anti-consumer legislation coming out of the likes of Lamar Smith.

Folks, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that legislation like this is generated and supported by major Hollywood studios. At the same time, we're all gung-ho to line up and fork over millions of dollars for the latest blockbuster, effectively funding the efforts to pass this legislation.

The problem isn't this shitty bill, it's the people who sponsored it. So we protest this bill today, bang enough pots and pans to shame a few backers into not letting this bill pass, then what? Those same dipshits who wrote this legislation still have jobs. They're going to try again, and again, and again until some mutation of this legislation passes. They'll sneak it into an appropriation bill while nobody's looking during recess, because there's too much lobbyist money at stake for them not to. We defeat SOPA today, only to face it again tomorrow. It's like trying to stop a cold by blowing your nose. It's time we go after the virus.

Well.. this is disappointing. It comes back to money in politics. When did America become a country of more more more more? Has it always been this way? For 20 years I've yet to see a single politician who stands for what they believe is right; instead their decisions are based off of their parties policies and/or where they get their money from. Ron Paul may be an exception, but everyone seems to discredit him. I'm confused and slowly losing hope for America's future.

SOPA allowed copyright holders to take down websites that they claimed were infringing on their rights. IPAA does nothing to change the punishment or enforcement mechanisms for copyright infringement. It creates a new position in the federal government and moves the existing IP Attache positions to be under that person. These are people that lobby foreign countries for stricter IP laws. They already exist, they are just being put into their own agency.

Yeah, especially since this has nothing to do with SOPA. The whole "IPAA is new SOPA" stuff is complete bullshit, they're nothing to do with each other besides being related to intellectual property rights. It'd basically just create a new position at embassies. Like, you might have a military attache (who works as a military ambassador, doing stuff like arranging war games) or a science attache (who might help create a joint research project between the nations). This creates an IP Attache (that's the full name of the bill.. IPAA = Intellectual Property Attache Act). The IP Attache will attempt to protect the USA's IP interests in foreign countries.

There's a proposed amendment to the bill, that directs the attache to also pursue things like fair use—if that amendment gets passed, the IPAA would actually be a tool to reduce the effects of copyright abroad. And if that amendment gets passed, I don't really have anything against the bill.

I really don't care. Who the fuck cares. It's going to happen one way or another. People don't care enough right now for it to matter. When shit becomes bad, not mildly lukewarm like it is now, then we can fight.

Seriously, this will be passed one way or another, mark my words. As much as I protest and do what I can, the only people who really care about this are 17-22 year olds, and people with no jobs. No one has the time or the energy to fight something so abstract and non-directly threatening. The funny thing is no one cares what young people think when it comes to congress and oligarchs; that generation has the least money, the least influence, the least interest.

None of my co-workers even know or if they do, care about this. It's such a small thing. It's not like they're going to be successful anyway. There are so many ways around internet censorship, it's a joke.

I can assure you all, they will continue to try and pass bills like this until they succeed. It will continue forever, under different names, from different sponsors, etc. It will never stop, but that doesn't mean we should give up.

You either vote them out, or force them out. When your voting system is corrupt and ineffectual, you're left with only once choice.

Things are going to have to get far far worse than "another unfair copyright law is up for a vote!" before the American people will grow the balls it will take to once again take control of their government by force.

Any creative work (including texts of proposed bills) created by an employee of the federal government in the context of their job is automatically in the public domain. This is to prevent things like a government monopoly on informing people of the laws, etc.

Sad to see new iterations of this bill continue to be pushed by congress... its like pushing your gf to try anal. She's either going to dump you, or give in. Since most of us consider dumping our govt to be way too much work, eventually were just going to bend over and spread. Guess i better go buy some lube